last night I dreamt I'd forgotten my name
by The Scarlett Ribbon
Summary: It starts with letters from the Vale and the sound of a dynasty dying - JonSansa
1. woke up to a wolf cry

**title: last night I dreamt I'd forgotten my name**

**summary: It starts with letter's from the Vale and the sound of a dynasty dying. **

**dedication: Sara, who asked for Usagi/Mamoru for her 21****st ****and gets Jon/Sansa instead. HAPPY BIRTHDAY SAILOR MOON BE FABULOUS FOREVER.**

* * *

_last night I dreamt I'd forgotten my name_

* * *

The first letter comes in the dark of night, when cold steam rises off the Wall like the breath of a giant swimming up to the stars. It's a night for ghosts and forgotten things, Jon thinks, staring out at the wilderness thousands of feet below him. His eyes chase shapes in the shadows and the fog makes him see things that only visit him in his dreams now.

For three nights past, Robb has watched him from a bloody throne with eyes that entreat from beyond the grave.

_I can't, _Jon tries to tell him. _I'm Lord Commander now and the Watch takes no part. _

But there is a girl out there called Arya Stark who is married to the bastard of Bolton, and the North is falling to wreck and ruin while he turns the other way and puts his hands over his ears to shut out the sound of a dynasty dying.

But just because you don't hear the tree falling, doesn't mean it hasn't been torn up from the roots and the Starks are almost extinct.

He prowls the Wall at night instead of succumbing to the dreams, and there is exhaustion in him that goes deeper than his bones, which moves like quicksilver between the gaps in his priorities and wrenches his soul open wide. Stannis had offered him Winterfell and he hadn't taken it.

"I'm not a Stark," he murmurs, hand reaching for a brother forever out of reach both in his nightmares and his waking hours. Robb was the King, the Lord's heir…he cannot pick up where he left off, like a hero from out of one of Sansa's songs.

He is so caught up in the memories of his siblings faces that he does not, at first glance, see the raven swoop down from the immutable jaws of the sky to perch on his shoulder.

"_Snow_," it caws, shaking the leg with the note attached and it's – it's not that strange really, that it came to him rather than the rookery like all the other birds do – but a chill that has nothing to do with the cold runs down his back, tick, tack, toe over his bones.

Jon carefully unties the small scrap of parchment, taking care not to tear it. When he unfurls it though, the hand of a ghost swims before his eyes, elegant and frightened.

_Jon, _she writes, _brother…_

He could cry, then, for the relief that spills out and over from his guarded heart.

"Sansa," he murmurs, clasping the parchment close to his chest. Not his favourite sister, but a sister all the same and there's still one Stark out there that the wide world hasn't killed yet.

* * *

The knives bite deep into him, piercing the dark spaces between his organs and he remembers Jaime Lannister saying once, as long ago as if it was another life, that men were nothing more than meat and water and oh, how his own river is pouring out now in rivulets of red on the snow.

Jon flees the body betraying him and lands somewhere else, soul pushing _out out out _and lands in wolf-skin, fangs bared and paws gliding over the ground as he runs from the scent of men.

* * *

He dreams, sometimes, in those forever moments when he's caught between his comatose body and Ghost's silent, prowling skin somewhere in the North. He dreams of the Heart Tree at Winterfell, Bran's face staring out of the wide wood and lips moving with silent words, of dragon's soaring through the night sky screaming fire and blood. Sometimes there's a girl who looks like Arya who stares at him with hands covered in blood, a crown of blue winter roses askew on her dark hair. Jon tries to reach her, but she is always on the horizon, always separated from him as if she stands behind a veil.

_Mother, _he doesn't say. _Lyanna, _he doesn't call her. She's only ever there for a moment and then she's gone, scattered on the wind like so many leaves.

Mostly, it is Sansa who appears before him, wide-eyed and pale, purple snakes hissing in her long auburn hair.

"Jon," she says, as the tower rises up and imprisons her in the sky, and poised in the windows of the Eyrie she looks ready to fly or die.

She doesn't say _help me, _or _I'm scared, _or _you're not the right brother. _Instead she folds bird wings around her arms and holds them aloft.

"The dragons are coming, Sansa."

"So are the wolves," she tells him and smiles bright and sharp, steel beneath silk. Her voice echoes down with the rising winds. Even in his dream, she is lovely as she dives, wings unfurled and catching on the air and she snaps him up with claws that don't exist. The whole world spreads out below them, and they can see far away even beyond the narrow sea, to Braavos and Mereen, all the far-away places he's never been.

"I'm dreaming this."

Sansa looks at him with deep, blue eyes. "I think we both are," she murmurs.

* * *

Satin keeps him alive in the cold hollows beneath the Wall, far from the prying eyes of his brothers.

_Ex-brother's, _he reminds himself as he opens his eyes for the first time in a month.

"You're awake," his squire whispers, setting down a bowl of honeyed wine hastily.

"Barely," Jon says, or tries to. He feels as helpless as a newborn babe, weak and almost dead of hunger.

His head is still full of Sansa's face, older and more beautiful than h recalls, and the sound of dragon's roaring.

"My Lord," Satin hesitates, helps him up when he sees Jon's refusal to rest. "It's – It's your sister."

"Arya?" he asks, thinking of Mance Rayder and the rescue party he meant to join. His heart is a mix of hope and dread. "Is it – Did Ramsay Snow…?"

"No. I mean – I don't know. Not that sister. Your other sister."

His heart leaps inside his chest, panicked and elated. "Sansa?"

"They're calling her the Queen in the North, now, milord. She's got the force of the Vale and the Riverlands behind her."

Satin holds out another two letters, crumpled and obviously snatched before the new Commander can see them. Jon reads them feeling sick to his bones. The image of Robb – murdered for a crown and a marriage slight – flickers before his eyes and he thinks of his sister, so delicate and ladylike, enamoured with a monster in the guise of a prince, helpless, a puppet to the Northern Lords –

"Where is she?" Jon demands, pushing himself unsteadily to his feet because he cannot read any more without screaming. His duty was to the Wall, but his brothers have killed him and for that, he considers his oaths fulfilled. His head swims and his chest pounds, but he will not turn the other way anymore.

_I cannot lose anyone else, I can't, I can't –_

"Riding North, milord," Satin tells him, gulping at the expression on Jon's face. He can only imagine what he looks like, half-dead and poised for battle.

He still has Lord Commander Mormont's sword; he unsheathes it with his burnt hand and turns to his former squire.

"Lead me to a horse," he commands grimly.

Once he was told that love was the death of honour. It seems the reverse is also true; the death of his honour has freed him for love.

Robb watches him leave with sad blue eyes, a bloody ghost he will always regret.

The gods have tested him before, but Jon thinks of all that he is lost, all that he might yet save and rides out into the night, leaving Watch and Wall behind.

_Home, _he thinks, urging his horse faster and faster towards the ruins of his father's hall. _We're going home. _

It's the easiest decision Jon has ever made.

_tbc_

* * *

**notes: wow this has turned into a monster, sorry. also first time writing Jon and I'm shitting myself because omg the pressure to get him right. **

**notes2: once upon a time sara and I talked about ASOIAF and now we are obssessed. **

**notes3: also I just freaked out because I can't remember how far sara is with the books and SHIT. **


	2. tell the world I'm coming home

**title: last night I dreamt I'd forgotten my name**

**summary: It starts with letters from the Vale and the sound of a dynasty dying. **

**dedication: Sara, for all the obvious reasons but mainly because this is still her birthday fic. **

* * *

The home she returns to is a wreck and ruin.

Sansa – Queen in the North – draws up outside the walls of Winterfell with ten thousand men marching behind her, carrying the banners of her House, and she doesn't flinch. She's seen cities burn and children die in the time since that innocent little flower she was left these particular walls.

_Just a child, _she thinks regretfully, almost able to see that girl as she rode out with dreams of crowns and songs. _It was so long ago, now. _

"Your Grace?" Harry asks, concerned, ever loyal. In private, perhaps, he would lay a hand on her shoulder. "Shall we proceed?"

Sansa smiles, lovely and cold as the snow falling around them. "Begin."

It's not really a beginning, of course.

* * *

_last night I dreamt I'd forgotten my name_

* * *

The Frey's died, horribly.

Sansa is no butcher, no killer of men, but she wields the sword to finally take Lord Walder's head off when the skirmish is over. The Twins are half-burnt to nothing, sky stained with ash and smoke, when they drag him before her.

"Take him alive," she'd commanded Harry, and he'd obeyed.

"Catelyn," Lord Walder whispers ghost white as she steps forward with the blade in hand and they force him to his knees.

It taks seven blows with the sword to sever his head from his shoulders, and when it is over her dress is splattered with blood. She wonders, then, if every man she kills will mistake her for her mother.

Roslin and the boy who squired for her brother – _Olyvar, _she remembers distractedly – them, she spares, along with the youngest children.

"Congratulations," she tells him, ignoring his stricken face. "You are now Lord of the Crossing."

It is a bloody business, vengeance. Sansa collects her brother's bones, her brother's crown, and takes one of the youngest for a hostage, a quiet, stammering girl named Shirei who looks as happy to leave the Twins as Sansa was to burn it.

"I was going to marry your sister," Elmar Frey weeps when the killing is over and the blood is still wet on her dress. "They promised me I could, but the Bastard got her instead. Can I help you rescue her?"

She wants to laugh, to crush his dreams in the mud the way hers were, once. No Frey will ever marry a Stark, of that she is certain.

"Ramsay Snow does not have my sister," she says instead, because even now, kindness is still her instinctive reaction, is still deep in her bones with winter and wolves.

"But he _said – _Lord Walder –"

The thought of Arya, skinny and scabby-kneed is painful, glass shards in her throat that tear her open from the inside. If there is one thing she knows, it's that the Lannister's never had her errant sister.

"He was wrong."

Robb, Rickon Bran– two of her siblings are dead, though she has doubts about the latter. Her sister is missing, but one brother still remains to her. Sansa thinks of letters scribbled in the dark of night, heart hammering, ears pricked for the sound of footsteps, and solemn grey eyes.

It is Jon she thinks of, when she sets her eyes Northward. Jon, and the promise of home.

* * *

When she's done with the Dreadfort, she commands her men to burn it to the ground – but not before finding half of Winterfell's women and children in the dungeons, shivering and starved.

Old Nan cries when Sansa reaches her, cries and presses her hands to Sansa's cheeks.

"Little one," she cries, old and frail and damaged as Sansa is. "Oh, my little one has come home."

She nearly cries herself, then, but manages to hold the flow of tears back, to only curl her hand around the hands of the woman who told her all her favourite stories – the first piece of home, of Winterfell, that she has ever gotten back.

And then Jon comes and she cannot hold the tears back at all.

* * *

He rides into her camp as night falls, a dark stranger with her dead father's face.

"Your Grace!" the men call, alarmed and she runs from her tent, prepared for an attack, an ambush – but it is not sword's she finds. Jon's eyes meet hers across the infinite space between them, familiar grey, _beloved Stark grey – _and her heart stops.

The world stops.

Sansa screams. Jon tumbles from his horse as she darts forwards, hiking her skirts up in one hand and _running, _and it doesn't matter that it's not Queenly, it doesn't matter that she is behaving like a child in front of all her men, because it is _Jon, _it is her brother-cousin here at last and she remembers dreaming in the Eyrie, dreaming of flying and seeing the whole world below, his voice in her ears, and _"I think I'm dreaming, Sansa…"_

It's not a dream, now.

This is real.

The warm, weak body cradled in her arms, completely real.

"Jon," she whispers, as he sleeps, smoothing his hair back from his closed eyes. A fever rages through him, and she tends to his wounds with trembling hands, a little girl again in the safe confines of her pavillion.

_Stabbed, _she thinks, _like Robb, I nearly lost him, he could have died, he could have _died –

In her dreams, a tree with Bran's face told her Jon would come back to her, whispered secrets about princes and dragons and blue winter roses. None of that matters right now.

Sansa kisses his brow gently, heart lurching, _thrumming _and settles down beside him to sleep for a night.

It is the first time since father died, since she watched helplessly as his head rolled down the steps of the sept, that she does not have nightmares.

_tbc_

* * *

**notes: in the words of my moon princess, "barfs"**

**notes2**: **five police cars have just gone screaming past in the last two minutes. should i be scared.**

**REVIEW LOVELIES OR I WILL EAT YOU BRAINS.**


	3. there's winter in your bones

**title: last night I dreamt I'd forgotten my name**

**summary: it starts with letters from the Vale and the sound of a dynasty dying - JonSansa**

**dedication: Moirail, because Holden/Allie and strep throat and steamed pork buns. **

* * *

_last night I dreamt I'd forgotten my name_

* * *

The dawn comes and Jon's fever does not break.

Sansa can feel the heat radiating off his skin as she scrubs him down with a cold rag, slicking water gently over his arms and face, his bare chest.

"Sansa," he murmurs, caught in the depths of a sleep that is obviously hot and uncomfortable and unhappy. He calls out for Arya, too, and Robb and Bran and Rickon. Sometimes there is even a plea for Father.

Because she does not doubt that to Jon, Eddard Stark will always be Father. Prince Rhaegar is a phantom of history, a ghost of legend that little boys grew up to, and he never even laid eyes on his last born child. She thinks of the stripling Jon was when she was growing up, all long, awkward limbs and sad grey eyes – the only piece of home left to her, even as a man grown.

"When you wake up, Winterfell will be ours again," she whispers against his hair, before she takes her leave, Old Nan staying behind to tend to his wounds.

She'd stay here and watch over him all day if she could, but Sansa is not a little girl anymore, she is a Queen and she has an army to command.

* * *

"Begin," she says to Harry, and it goes like this: a secret tunnel, the gates opening, her men storming in. They do not sack the castle; this is not a siege, this is not plunder, this is not _stealing. _

The drums pound, and the Bolton men die, and Ramsay is still fucking his wife when Sansa enters the room with fifty men and Harry drags him off the girl called Arya Stark by his hair.

"I am the Lord of Winterfell," he screams at her, spittle flying everywhere, his breeches gathered around his ankles. There's a knife at his throat and she thinks that he is a mad dog, rabid and feral and inhuman. "I married the girl, I married a Stark, this castle in _mine _you mewling cunt!"

Sansa regards him with a stillness she learned in Kings Landing; quiet steel and smooth lake surfaces. "I am Sansa Stark," she says, quiet, quiet and soft like the falling snow. "And that is not my sister. You are no Lord, Ramsay Snow, but _I am a Queen._"

The world has been ripped out from under her so many times, but this – this is turning things back to rights, this is pulling the lie out from underneath one of the monsters that destroyed everything she knew.

Lord Royce hands her the dagger, dragonbone handle and gleaming blade. It feels foreign in her hands, blades will never be her weapon of choice, but she is the Stark in Winterfell and the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. Even if that man is a Lady, a Queen.

Sansa stabs him in the chest, feels it lodge in his blackened heart and _twists. _Harry lets him drop to the floor and Sansa steps across the rapidly growing pool of blood to the bed where Jeyne is still sobbing hysterically.

"Sansa," she cries, little girl, broken, _broken – _

"You're safe now," Sansa tells her, wrapping her arms around the childhood friend she thought dead, thought gone, and rocks her gently. She places her own thick furs around Jeyne's trembling body, taking silent note of the whip scars on her back, the bite marks on her thighs, and thinks that Ramsay deserved a much more horrible death than the one she gave him.

"You're safe now," she repeats, motioning for her men to remove the body from view and mayhaps feed it to the dogs. "No one will ever hurt you again."

She's not sure if she's speaking to Jeyne or to herself.

* * *

"Burn the bodies," Jon tells her, half-conscious and still feverish as she settles him in her bed. Sansa has taken the room which once belonged to her mother, but there is nothing remaining of Catelyn Stark here. Only the warmth remains the same, the only thing House Bolton couldn't eradicate. That and the memories.

"Jon," Sansa admonishes him, concerned for him, primarily for him, when there is so much else that needs doing. His hand grasps her wrist, fingers close around her skin tight. Her heart skips a beat.

"Sansa," he insists, and in the firelight his eyes are almost silver. "_Burn them."_

* * *

They find Theon Greyjoy hiding in the Godswood, hardly recognisable as the handsome boy who served her Lord father. Her men think nothing of him, this white-haired, broken man who trembles at shadows, barely look at him.

"He says his name is Reek," Harry tells her, as this ruined shell of her almost-once-upon-a-time brother is hauled before her.

The banners of House Stark are fluttering from the battlements once more, a grey direwolf running across a white field, and Sansa sits in her father's seat. The throne that would have been Robb's, if he'd lived to return.

Beside her, Jeyne stiffens and Sansa recognises the feel of terror on behalf of someone you love. She wonders if Theon stood by and let Ramsay abuse Jeyne, the way the whole of Kings Landing stood by as Joffrey abused her. She wonders if, just maybe, Ramsay broke Theon long before he took Jeyne to wife.

Sansa rises from her throne and extends a delicate hand to the prince of the Iron Islands, teeth missing, fingers missing, hair falling out. He cannot even look her in the eyes as he takes her hand.

"A bath, I think," she says quietly, leading him away from her men. "And then you will tell me everything."

"Yes, m'lady," Theon whispers, mouth muddying the words like a commoner, tripping over the words.

"None of that," Sansa replies sharply, once they are out of earshot and have left the hall and the crowd behind. He limps with every step. "You are Theon Greyjoy, not a lowborn peasant."

"Sansa –"

"Did you think I would not know you? Or did you hope?"

He fumbles for words, and she sees the expression on his face as shame and disgust and bitter, _bitter _regret.

"I wanted only to die," he replies at last, shaking like so many leaves. "I should have. At his side."

"You caused the death of one my brothers," she says, "but I know you did not kill Bran and Rickon when you tried to steal our home from us. But that's the only thing I can absolve you of, Theon."

* * *

When night falls, Sansa locks herself in her mother's old room and cries into the door. Everywhere she looks, she sees echoes of what once was and it hits her over and over again –

Robb is never coming back. Her mother and father are never coming back.

She doesn't hear Jon rise and make his way over to her on unsteady legs, but when his hand settles delicately on her shoulder, Sansa turns and buries her face in his chest.

They sink to the floor, grief leaking from their bones into the cold night air. Her forehead is wet, and she realises with a start that Jon is crying too.

_tbc_

* * *

**notes: pretend that you want it, don't react. the damage is done. **

**notes2: when it's so cold in your house you can see your breath on the air. **

**review bitches**


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